Distributed goal assignment strategy for improving leader-following formation control performance

Abstract: This paper investigates a distributed goal assignment problem in leader-following formation control of second-order multi-agent systems. It is assumed that each agent can communicate with nearby agents within the communication range and the leader information is only available to a subset of agents. Compared with existing formation control schemes addressing the goal assignment issue, the main contribution of this paper is to construct a novel distributed assignment strategy allotting appropriate goal positions of agents in the leader-following formation control framework. Based on the rigorous analysis using the Lyapunov stability theory, the enhancement of the control performance is proved via the proposed assignment strategy. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our theoretical results, two examples including multiple quadrotors are simulated.